An Unexpected Grace

by Kristin von Kreisler

  She stopped at the office of Madeline, the head copywriter, whose morning sickness had turned her face a pale gray-green. Lila asked, “Are you feeling better?”

  Madeline smiled. “Graham crackers to the rescue.”

  “Good! See you later.” With a full day’s work ahead of her, Lila had to get going.

  After a quick drink at the water fountain, she hurried to her office, a tiny cubicle with fluorescent lights and no windows or doors. The walls, covered with felt the gray of smog, barely came to her shoulders because she was a shade less than six feet tall. She had a faux-birch desk, a gray-upholstered swivel chair, and a black rug with magenta specks that made her dizzy if she stared at them too long. To remind herself of the art career she’d vowed to return to, come hell or high water, she’d propped against the wall her boldest, brightest abstract painting, with greens and golds and reds that danced across the canvas. When she got bored or claustrophobic in her cubicle, she looked at the colors for consolation. They never failed her.

  Lila put on headphones and called the first person on the three-page list she’d been assigned: G. Roger Earling, features editor of the Bay Area Herald. As the phone rang, the smell of coffee traveled from the staff lounge. A cable car clanged its bell from the street below, as if to encourage her for a day of making cold calls.

  When Mr. Earling answered, Lila roused her most chipper self. “Good morning! This is Lila Elliot at Weatherby and Associates Public Relations. I was wondering if you got our press packet about the exciting ergonomics conference at Moscone Center.”

  “I don’t remember it,” he said, as flat as Illinois.

  Bad memory. The perennial excuse. Lila called up her determination. “I’ll send you another packet.”

  “Don’t bother. Waste of time.”

  “But it could interest you.”

  “Look, an ergonomics conference isn’t for us.” Mr. Earling sounded surly. His oatmeal must have boiled over that morning, and he’d run out of milk. Lila could tell these things after three long months of phoning hundreds of people.

  Calling editors and TV and radio producers was like marching toward an enemy in armor made of lace. You were vulnerable and had nothing but your wits and grit to get the job done. For the media coverage you begged and cajoled out of people, you often got hit with apathy, impatience, or rejection. Sometimes it was hard to shrug off the bad feelings, though Lila always clenched her teeth and kept going.

  “The conference is going to be fascinating. Really. Your readers will want to know about it.” To keep her foot in the door of Mr. Earling’s attention, Lila reeled off the products that would be displayed: potato peelers for arthritics, office chairs for people with bad backs, garden tools approved by the AARP, computer keyboards guaranteed to ward off carpal tunnel syndrome.

  He muttered a stifled “aargh” that sounded like a consumptive tiger’s growl. “Try calling our business section.”

  “Any specific person?” Lila pressed.

  “I don’t have time to lead you by the hand, miss.”

  Don’t take it personally. Lila pulled his arrow from her heart. “It would really help to have the right name.”

  With hopes Mr. Earling might be looking for one in a directory, Lila forced herself to wait in the silence that spread between them like a field of snow. As she glanced at her painting for moral support, she heard loud voices down the hall. A man was shouting, and a woman seemed to be trying to calm him. That was odd for Weatherby. Lila got up and looked out her open doorway. Seeing no one, she sat back down.

  “Okay,” Mr. Earling said. “Here’s somebody for you. Call Charles Saunders.”

  The woman’s voice got louder, higher pitched. It was Emily. “Please, please.” She sounded like she was begging.

  The man yelled garbled words that Lila couldn’t understand. Emily screamed, “No. Oh, God . . . Don’t!”

  Lila jumped to her feet to run to her friend. Just as Lila yanked off her headset and threw it on her desk, a blast, like a balloon exploding, only louder, came from the reception area. Then silence.

  Lila blinked and tried to figure out what the noise had been—but then came more explosions, one after another, too startling to comprehend. Something horrible was going on, but she couldn’t understand what it was. Surely no one would set off firecrackers in our office.

  When shouts came from around the corner, Lila froze. What she’d heard must have been a gun. More shots crackled and pinged, as if ricocheting off metal window frames. Glass shattered. So many people were screaming at once that she couldn’t make out single voices. Then somebody shouted, “Lock your doors!”

  Lila shrank back from the doorless entry to her cubicle. She smelled smoke, and her stomach felt like it was grinding lead. As her knees wobbled, she grabbed the phone, but her hands shook too hard to call 911. To keep from toppling over, she leaned on her chair.

  Should she dive under her desk? She wouldn’t fit. Run to the supply closet? She’d be an easy target in the hall. Hide behind her chair? It was too small a shield. Her bright red turtleneck invited bullets.

  More yells and shots. Thuds and slams like fighting in the hall. As heavy footsteps scuffled outside her cubicle, she steeled her will and forced her feet to take three steps to the wall adjacent to the entry. Trembling, she crouched down, folded her legs close to her chest, and tried to disappear.

  A man loomed in her open doorway. Without looking up, Lila heard his crazed, ragged breaths. On the floor his shadow twitched, and his agitation traveled into her and made her tremble harder. Her heart pummeled her chest.

  She hunched lower, but she felt his stare bore into her. She raised her eyes from black wing-tip shoes to a herringbone sports coat—to the contorted face of Yuri Makov, Weatherby’s janitor, who just last week had collected her trash and smiled at her. “Not you!” she yelled.

  Two sweaty ringlets clung to his forehead, and veins bulged at his temples. His lips were chapped, and a small, round, flesh-toned Band-Aid was on his quivering chin. With each breath, his chest heaved, and the flight bag hanging from his shoulder hit his hip. Everything about him jittered—except his eyes, which pierced her.

  Screaming in Russian, he jerked back his shoulders and shoved his handgun’s stubby barrel toward her. He pulled it away and slapped it against his thigh. He lifted the gun to his waist and held it in both hands, and the flesh around his eyes seemed to soften as if he were remembering something. Then with resolution in his eyes, he aimed the gun at her again and curled his finger around the trigger.

  “Yuri, what are you doing? Don’t shoot!” She stood, the better to plead.

  He shouted words she didn’t understand.

  “Please . . . Please, don’t . . . Please, oh, please.”

  Just as Lila lunged behind her office chair, fire seared a path through her chest. The force sent her reeling against the file cabinet. As she collapsed, her head hit metal and she bit her tongue. Her hand swept across the desk and sent the posters of Grace through the air. Lila crashed to the floor and gasped for breath.

  A shot crackled in the hall.

  Please, don’t let me die. Her left side felt like she was being burned alive. As her eyes sagged closed, her mind fogged. She retreated to an ice floe, roiling and bobbing in a dark, distant territory.

  2

  When Lila woke, her world was a thick, furry gray. She couldn’t tell how long she rode up and down on a seesaw of awareness, but eventually she rose toward the light and opened her eyes to slits. Her eyelids felt as if a pebble had been tied to each lash. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t will away the grogginess.

  On her back, she couldn’t move because her right arm was strapped down, and a needle connected to an intravenous tube was stuck into the back of her right hand and taped to her skin. Her left arm was in a plaster cast, and something pressed on her chest. When she shifted her shoulder’s position just half an inch, adhesive tape tugged her skin.

  She glanced around at bare
white walls and a blank TV screen. Through the mini-blinds, the fading sun shone in soft stripes across her blanket. A curtain was drawn, like a partial cocoon, around one side and the foot of her bed. She heard rubber soles squeak softly on linoleum, and she smelled bleach and bruised flower petals.

  What happened? How did I get here? Suddenly, she remembered getting shot. Shot, for God’s sake. Shot! One minute she’d been sitting at her desk, and the next, she was sprawled on the floor about to die in a pool of her own blood.

  But she wasn’t dead. She was in a hospital. She was alive.

  Still, maybe she could die or be permanently disfigured.

  As Lila cringed, her pain medication jumped in and bound her brain with golden cords that restrained her fear. Her world faded again to gray and furry.

  Lila woke to moonlight on her blanket. A low-wattage fluorescent light had been turned on above her head. Her mind had cleared enough to stop the feeling that she was groping, blindfolded, through a forest, but shock, confusion, and medication still muddled her brain.

  Her roommate’s TV screen flickered and blurred on the other side of the privacy curtain as an anchorman with a deep voice described a flood in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

  “There was another tragedy today,” he said. “Here’s our own Sasha Pinsky to tell us about a shooting at the Crockett Building on Post Street.”

  Desperate to hear what Sasha Pinsky would say, Lila strained to listen and searched the fuzzy TV colors on her curtain for hints of images that might tell her what had happened.

  “Yes, Mike,” said Sasha. “Behind me on the fifth floor is Weatherby and Associates, one of San Francisco’s oldest and best-known public relations firms. This morning a man went on a rampage here. He shot and killed seven employees and wounded three others.”

  Lila gasped. Her lungs felt like they’d collapsed. As she worked to breathe, her teeth began to chatter.

  “The three wounded are at San Francisco General,” Sasha Pinsky said. “Two are in satisfactory condition. One is critical.”

  Am I in critical condition? Oh, God, who is dead?

  As if Sasha Pinsky had read Lila’s mind, she added, “So far the police haven’t released any of the victims’ names.”

  “Does anyone have an idea how this happened?” Mike asked.

  “Not yet. Yuri Makov, the alleged gunman, shot and killed himself before the police arrived. They’re only saying he was a Russian immigrant who’d worked as a janitor for the firm the last eight months.”

  Lila’s body shook. Her brain roared. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes onto her hair, fanned out on the pillow.

  Seven dead, three wounded. It wouldn’t sink in. She couldn’t grasp the magnitude of the tragedy. It was too much to take in at one time.

  Till a nurse gave her a sedative that knocked her out again, Lila mentally replayed Yuri Makov aiming his gun at her and pulling the trigger. Again and again she heard the blast and smelled the smoke. She saw his contorted face, as real as if he were standing close enough for her to feel his heartbeat. And on her neck she felt the turpentiney breath of terror.

  The next morning Dr. Lovell, the head of Lila’s medical team, must have sensed that psychologically she was dragging a ball and chain through tar. When he pulled up a chair to her bed and studied her face, his expression hardened like he thought she’d inspired Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He sat next to her and looked into her eyes, whose navy blue seemed black against her pale cheeks. He asked, “So how’s it going? Are we feeling okay?”

  “I’ve felt better.”

  “Not surprising.” A strapping man with an incongruously soft mustache, like an Easter duckling’s down, Dr. Lovell crossed one leg over the other so his pants’ pleat protruded, as sharp and clean as a knife blade. “Well, I’ve got good news for you. The killer used a .38-caliber gun. He shot you at an angle so the bullet traveled through your breast and lodged in your arm.”

  “That’s good news?”

  “You bet. If he’d shot you head-on with something like a Terminator magnum, the bullet could have ripped through your heart or lung or ricocheted off a rib and landed God knows where. Somebody was watching out for you. You should thank your lucky stars.”

  “Oh.” Lila shivered.

  “All you’ve got is flesh wounds, a fractured humerus, and some muscle and nerve damage. We’ll have to wait and see how the nerves heal.”

  Alarmed, Lila sat up straighter even though it hurt to move. “It’s all got to heal. I have to get back to work and save money. I want to do my art.”

  “You will if you don’t have complications.”

  Complications? “You think I will?”

  “Let’s hope not.” When Dr. Lovell clasped his hands over his clipboard, his starched white coat crackled.

  Hoping for no complications was far from reassuring. Lila wanted guarantees. She was about to ask what complications she should be looking for—and whether she’d go through life with half a breast—when Dr. Lovell flicked a speck of lint off his immaculate trousers and asked, “Has anybody talked with you about going for counseling?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not an expert, but you’re a candidate for post-traumatic stress. You know that, don’t you? You seem edgy and depressed.”

  “I just got shot,” she reminded him. She’d earned her edge and depression.

  “Granted, but some people handle it easier than others,” Dr. Lovell said. “Have you had any flashbacks?”

  “I can’t get what happened out of my mind.”

  “A psychologist could help.”

  Lila didn’t think so, not when terror seemed embedded in her. She pressed her head deeper into her pillow. “I appreciate your suggestion, but I’d like to work things out myself.”

  “It’s up to you.” Dr. Lovell checked his watch.

  Before Lila could ask questions, he got up and headed for the door.

  Wait! What about the complications? And my breast? What happens next? She was too weak to call after him.

  With courtesy that her mother had instilled in her, Lila said “thank you” to the back of his head.

  3

  Every day Cristina came to visit. When Lila’s hospital roommate left, Cristina took over the room. She set get-well cards on the windowsills and tables and dragged chairs from the hall to hold the flowers, stuffed animals, and boxes of candy that kind people had sent. She tied balloons to the doorknobs and bed rails and went to Lila’s apartment for toiletries, books, and clothes, which she laid on the empty bed.

  From friends in the Crockett Building, Cristina also brought news of Weatherby employees who’d died. She told Lila about the bullet that had torn through the St. Christopher medal Emily had worn around her neck, and the futile emergency C-section to save the baby of Madeline, the head copywriter. Cristina described the marks Edmond, the vice president of marketing, had clawed into Yuri’s neck after jumping him from behind, and the raincoat that Max, a graphic designer, was still wearing when a bullet killed him.

  Lila lay in bed and pondered these details as if she were trying to decipher the Rosetta stone. Though in her mind she could not seem to process the tragedy, she longed for information about what had happened. Since she’d cancelled her smartphone in order to save money, she couldn’t surf the web. So every few minutes she flicked on the TV and searched the channels for news.

  One morning she came to a broadcast of a woman reporter holding a red-and-white umbrella outside the Crockett Building. As pedestrians with coat collars turned up against the rain passed behind her, she said, “The police have just released a photo of Yuri Makov, the alleged gunman.” When Yuri’s picture appeared on the screen, Lila, though sore and feverish, bolted up in bed.

  The very sight of him made her queasy, yet she couldn’t take her eyes off him. He appeared ten years younger—perhaps in his late twenties—and his shining eyes and plump cheeks made him look almost cherubic, like Cupid after growing up and putting his archery and nudist day
s behind him. His hair curled at his shirt collar, and a dapper white handkerchief peeped out of his sports coat pocket. In his agreeable expression, there was not the slightest trace of a capacity for violence. What had changed him into a killer?

  The reporter pushed a wayward strand of hair behind her ear and said, “I’ve talked to every policeman I can find this morning. They’re still trying to figure out why anyone would commit such a heinous act, but so far they’ve come up with nothing.”

  An anchorman wearing an eggplant-colored tie that clashed with his auburn hair broke in: “Maria, do they have any theories ?”

  “Not yet. They’re still questioning people, but so far no one’s been willing to speculate on what could have driven him to a shooting spree.”

  “Maybe we can get some insight here,” the anchorman said. “I’ve got Dr. Alan Leibowitz, a Cal psychology professor, with me in the studio. He’s a stress-and-violence-prevention consultant with the U.S. Postal Service, where this kind of tragedy has occurred before. ‘Going postal,’ some people call it?”

  “Yes.” Dr. Leibowitz’s eyes looked like raisins pressed into his doughy face. He fidgeted and glanced shyly at the camera.

  “What causes going postal? Does anybody know?” the anchorman asked.

  Like a dog, Lila pricked her ears to listen.

  “One main cause can be pressure on the job. If you’ve got someone with emotional problems, and you make him work overtime too much, or you pass him up for promotion, or you downsize people around him so he feels insecure . . .”

  “Then that can set him off?” the anchorman interrupted.

  “Possibly.”

  Yet our office was a friendly, easy place to be, Lila thought. No overtime or downsizing, and to what job would Yuri Makov have hoped to be promoted?

  “Working with a dysfunctional boss can set off someone too,” Dr. Leibowitz said. “If somebody resents a my-way-orthe-highway supervisor, it can be like putting a match to gasoline. A trivial thing can make some frustrated person explode in a rage.”